The use of cytotoxic drugs in the surgery of malignant disease.

Cancer chemotherapy has been practised from time immemorial and Rhazes, a Baghdad surgeon, introduced chemistry into “physic” in the ninth century A.D. In 1894 W. B. Coley used the toxins of streptococcus pyogenes and bacillus prodigiosus to treat twelve patients with inoperable bone sarcoma, and disappearance of the tumour occurred in three cases. Johnston (1962), in a carefully controlled trial designed to re-evaluate the therapeutic effects of Coley’s fluid, obtained objective improvement in nine of thirty-four patients with inoperable metastatic neoplasms treated by Coley’s toxin; she found no improvement in thirty-seven